"People would tell me they felt like bursting into tears when they went into a supermarket," recalls Nestle (pronounced Nessel), the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University and currently a visiting professor at Berkeley. "They said they didn't know how to choose food or how to read labels," she says, and they felt anxious about all the health warnings on different food packages. They pleaded with Nestle to help, and she began to pay attention.

Nestle's latest book, What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating, due out in May from North Point Press, investigates and demystifies individual areas of the supermarket, drawing a clear link between the food industry's manipulative marketing messages and the public's bewilderment.

Nestle's talk will be followed by a conversation with Michael Pollan, professor in the Graduate School of Journalism, whose new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, has just been published by Penguin Press. I thought Pollan's earlier book The Botany of Desire was fascinating.